Mike's Minute: You can't trust Adrian Orr

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

The great crime out of Adrian Orr's move is you can't trust him.

A central bank is supposed to get the economy and he and his committee clearly don’t.

Don’t get me wrong - what he did was the right thing. A lot of people think it was the right thing.

But he is supposed to land it softly and he crashed it. Having crashed it, he still denied he crashed it until it clearly became so bleeding obvious that he did what he did yesterday.

The cuts that weren't coming until next year are here now. You only do what he did because you overcooked it in the first place.

Brad Olsen of Infometrics was wrong, but he was wrong for the right reasons. He said heads should roll and on that he is spot on.

You don’t run a commentary that says one thing then do another. Their defence will be "things change", but that has always been the Orr weak point. He likes to position himself as some sort of completely removed observer, devoid of any influence in the economy at all.

"Things have come to a grinding halt? How did that happen?"

Last time he talked he saw one thing and told us how it was going to play out. He was wrong.

But to the Olsen point, and indeed my point, was - aren't we supposed to believe him?

When non-tradeable inflation is 5.4%, is that the same as 0-3%? No, it isn't.

When unemployment is 4.6% and not 5.5%, has that metric fallen to where it is supposed to have? No, it hasn’t.

But that doesn’t matter now, apparently.

"Forget everything I said, I've decided to cut." That's how the Governor plays it.

The inescapable truth is he cocked it up. He tried to right it, overcorrected, pretended he didn’t until it was too late, the rhetoric didn’t match the reality, and we got to yesterday.

The result? We'll take it.

The quality of the journey? Bollocks.

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